Brian Cherry Award Forum – 2020 Recap and Recordings

The Brian Cherry Awards aim is to recognise excellence in post graduate / student research in corrosion. This event was conceived by the Victorian branch of the ACA and has been run as a branch event since 2009. The award honours the late Professor Brian Cherry of Monash University for his significant contribution to corrosion education, consulting and the Australasian Corrosion Association Inc.

This year the Victorian branch decided, for the first time, to open up the event to participants from all ACA branches Australasia-wide. To accommodate the increased number of participants and help showcase the wide variety of research being undertaken, the event was expanded to two sessions. Due to COVID considerations, it was also the first time this forum was run online. As the event moved to include entrants from all states, the ACA offered cash prizes for the top four entrants at the following amounts:

1st place – $1,000
2nd place – $500
3rd place – $250
4th place – $100

The first phase of the forum featured nine young researchers who were selected from a wider group of entrants via an abstracts submission processes as determined by our organising panel of Scott Wade, Wayne Neil and Sarah Furman. The following students took part in a 3 Minute Thesis© style event, wherein they had one slide and a 3 minute time frame to excite the audience and our judging panel about their research.

From this initial event, four finalists were selected to compete in a longer presentation style event, in which they had 15 minutes and a full presentation to convince our judging panel.

The finalists covered four different states/branches (Victoria, Newcastle, Queensland and Western Australia) with topics including the corrosion of metallic wall-ties (Barbara Jardim do Nascimento – University of Newcastle), organic coating service life prediction (Joseph Davies – Queensland University of Technology), corrosion protection techniques for high strengths steels (Esmaeil Pournamazian Najafabadi – Monash University) and multi-species biofilms and their relationship to corrosion (Benjamin Tuck – Curtin University). It was great to see the depth and excellence of research being undertaken.

The organisers would also like to thank all of our guest judges Sarah Furman for the abstract submissions, Bruce Hinton, Ian Macleod and Graham Sussex for the 3MT Round, and Chris Weale, Peter Mart and Nick Birbilis for the final round who had to make some especially hard decisions given the high quality of presentations.

If you’re a member of the ACA, you can watch a recording of both the 3MT Round, and the Final Presentation Round below as long as you log in to your ACA account.

We would again like to thank all of those who applied for this competition and to congratulate all our participants and our winners on their efforts and the high quality of their presentations. We strongly encourage all who will remain eligible and any newcomers to apply for next years competition which we hope will improve upon the great success of the first year of the Brian Cherry Awards Forum’s expansion to an association-wide competition.

3MT Participants

Finalists